Faith and sacrifice

    Yesterday I had the chance to fellowship with a family from my home church in Cupertino. This particular family has seen hardship and learned how to balance their lives in front of their children through these struggles. One thing that I admire the most about this family is their steadfast love for God. The father told me, "We had a challenge when we were younger to pray and read scripture daily, and so far we have done that together everyday" if it were anyone else I would have honestly thought that they probably meant everyday as best as they could... however with this family they really didn't skip a beat. This constant discipline became more natural to them over the time that they formed and practiced their routine with God. The thing that makes this harder is the fact that they have four kids! This makes me reflect on how at my age and life stage with balancing personal time with God, work, friends and family seem hard enough. It is encouraging to know and see a family that pursues God in the company of family. This Christmas break for me is really about finding God's grace through the eyes of others. It has been such an interesting time hearing stories of faith from other families and meetings that I have had while up here in NorCal. I have seen what faith looks like in the midst of sacrifice and loss but also who God through what is created. On another note, over break I had the chance to watch slumdog millionare a movie just recently released. The movie had such great themes and social commentary that I really recommend people to watch it too, its not too scandalous or bloody either. Blessings on your holidays and I hope everyone gets a chance to hear another story from friends/family that has never been heard before.  

I am here on purpose...

We just finished our InterVarsity Christmas Party for Mesa College and the one big take away that I am having is that our students are making genuine, honest and transparent steps for community. This is so powerful because our family is attracting international students, nominal Christians and seekers. They are discovering new passions in community and purpose while being at Mesa. The question of the night was..."Christmas is the story of Jesus, What is your story?" The stories of students that were suppose to be in the navy, at San Diego State or in New York yet ended up at Mesa College were numerous, they really spoke of God's action as purposeful and meaningful. The major dilema on campus is that students don't know why they are there besides community college just being a road block, a means to an ends. But the look on their faces when you see that world view collapse and the God of heaven and earth becomes a bit more day to day...that is priceless. Our God is The Living God and with purpose He directs us Proverbs 16:9.

Family Traditions

     I noticed that my family really doesn't have that many family traditions when I went home for Thanksgiving. Apparently for 8 years Anna Chang and her family have gone to this one Korean BBQ restaurant in San Francisco and afterward they walk a scripted route at Fisherman's Wharf each year during Thanksgiving. Other families go around the table and say what they are thankful for, and at Christmas some families bring out ornaments that have been passed on from generation to generation. It made me feel like starting something in my family besides my gift exchange idea this year. 

   But then I remembered that I am also partaking in Mesa InterVarsity family traditions. Our group has grown so close that community building is just exponentially multiplying. In God's kingdom there is an importance on repetition and remembrance. Tradition done in the right manner helps us write down God's story. Christmas is a sense of tradition even thought it is sometimes confused for gifts, it is a chance to remember the amazing incarnation of Christ. The world was given hope in the form of a child... how counter culture is that!  

    I hope that we all get to take part in some good traditions during this holiday season not just the "black fridays and cyber mondays" but ones that will leave a deeper impression on our hearts. So carol it up with family and your local church. 

I call Jesus Immanuel 

Isa 7:14 

Matt 1:23

Back in the routine

After being sick, stuck on an island and then just being out of town I am finally back at home. It has been a crazy couple of weeks and I am thankful for some normalcy in life. I remember talking to Anna about time flying right past us because it is already Thanksgiving. My conclusion was that we have had so many events from friends or work that just packed the days during this season that time just flies by. Usually these events are spread out unevenly over time so that we wait for an event to happen versus something happening every week that we "have to" be at or have to do. And I feel dissatisfied when your Sunday actually feels like a Thursday. This is why I find it hard sometimes to get into healthy habits, a routine that I can stay disciplined and attentive to. Of course this is no excuse for my lack of motivation to search for God in my daily life but having a buffer to guard your life and heart is good when you are always filling yourself with more work than normal. I am really trying to find what works well in cases of ministry because it is not 9-5 and the challenges come home with you constantly. Also with full time ministry it is a passion and calling thus much of our lives, and those in full time ministry, begin merging life and work. I have read "Emotionally Healthy Church" but I am going to start reading "The Crucifixion of Ministry" by Andrew Purves to hopefully gain some more insight. Just sharing my current thoughts in a busy season.

Chinese American Part 2

I wrote this shortly after a unique conversation I had a few years back while working at my biotech job. 

“So are you Asian or American?” my co-worker asked me nonchalantly as we discussed issues of culture. Almost immediately my Caucasian associate from New York chimes in and calls me American looking for a strong confirmation in his eyes as he asks, “You were born here right?”  I sat in silence for a long time, then I thought about my mom and how she always said and still says in mandarin, “You are Chinese” then I hear the common tag with that quote “I want you to marry a Chinese girl” and my response would always be “man that is sooo traditional mom”. However his question made me begin to wonder what really categorizes people as either Asian or American. Especially when you bubble in those scantron forms for tests, jury duty, or immigration papers. At what point do you consider yourself Asian, American, or Asian American? Is it based upon speaking a language fluently? Because I see many who are bilingual/mixed ethnicities and they must feel like cultural chameleons, but I don’t think that defines your admission into one culture.

Is it the way you look? If I wear the traditional Chinese uniform or Billabong California surf wear I feel out of place in certain environments but intrinsically I am not persuaded toward one culture by wearing a piece of cloth.

Is it where you live? When I go to China I feel so out of place and the Chinese people can tell by my fragmented Chinese and demeanor that I come from America. Most of them just give up on me and we both begin to point. For me personally there is a need to hit up a Starbucks in China not because I like coffee but it is a sign of familiarity. Yet, when I am in America I get the same questions like, “So where are you from?” “You must be good at math right?” and the “ching ching chong” remarks from the not so bright folk. Food choice doesn’t really determine your culture either…I can cook a mean Kung Pao chicken dish at home in San Diego but I love Italian. I do believe that residency has a large influence on how you see yourself as Asian or American but it is not the only factor.      

Was it how you were raised? It is true that I cannot offer my children the best of my Chinese culture because I don’t have all the resources to teach it. But perhaps my broken Chinese will produce Chinglish speaking children haha. Already I see a divide when talking to my mother in Chinglish  and she responds fluently in Mandarin; something is always lost in translation or not always expressed as it was meant to be with depth and effectiveness that we both intended it to be. Raised in a Mandarin speaking home I struggled with the English grammar system but ironically I now struggle with Chinese.    

Here is a statement that has become somewhat of a proverb to travelers. “When you travel you want to live like the locals”. My question concerning ethnic identity is…do we always tend to shed our identity as we try to fit into the norm of society? If we are trying to fit in we lose a bit of our culture and ourselves because we will always be traveling. I am content to say that I am Chinese American the best of both China and America, this is my culture…this is who I am. However I do not know what my children or my children’s children will call themselves. I will offer them my history and my parent’s history and the blessings that my culture brings. With such factors as language, look, lifestyle, and nurture I also leave that task of identity up to them and God. I know that God will pave an ethnic journey and self-discovery for each child. I figure that they can discover it as with the rest of the world when asking the bigger question of “who am I?”

 

 

    

Chinese American

So this week is the San Diego Asian American Film Festival (www.sdaff.org) and it reminds me of how much I love being Chinese American. I have struggled in the past with why God made me Asian and not white (not all the time, but on various occasions when I was younger) and why my friends and I had racist comments thrown at us when we were younger or how my white friends never had peanut butter noodles or shrimp chips growing up. I hated the ugliness of Chinese people with their perfectionist tendencies and shame based culture that seemed to plague each generation. In college much of my identity as an Asian American deepened through the work of InterVarsity. InterVarsity was a choice that I consciously made versus going to an Asian American specific fellowship. This meant going to a fellowship that was racially diverse and at times uncomfortable. This was uncomfortable because people communicated differently, ate foods that were foreign to me and hugged me! I slowly learned what "my own culture" meant, not being home in Asia or America and taking the blessings of what this culture could bring. An example of my culture is in worship. I always had a love for the Asian American worship style (in part repetition), but never knew such a style existed. I always thought that worship was based from what I experienced growing up in a Chinese church. The AA worship style was so embedded in me that my first two years of college I would "sneak" over to AACF (Asian American Christian Fellowship) at UCSD to take part in their worship sessions. Yet InterVarsity exposed other styles of worship to me like gospel songs and songs with different languages.
There seems to be a strong sense of growth in the Asian American community. Older Asian American staff have shared their experiences and stories of a growing presence on the national stage of InterVarsity. Now I feel like it is my responsibility to pass on what has been taught to me about the value of ethnic identity and the celebratory pieces in being Asian American for my students. What is equally important in learning about identity is applying what has been learned to build bridges with other ethnicities. I am still learning about the AA culture and how it is currently being shaped by God's own special plans, but for now I am grateful that this journey of ethnic identity is done in a community from both the past and present Asian Americans. Go watch a movie if your in San Diego and appreciate the talent and blessings that the Asian American community brings.

Did you hear?

    When I think about a super power that would be really awesome a couple answers come into mind, but one in particular I thought would be really great. Traveling through time. I know this sounds a bit cheesy but I would like to travel back in time and just see how Jesus just worked it. And I would have liked to sit with the disciples as they found out that their Savior lives. I mean there are other times in history that I would like to check out but it doesn't even compare to the Living God walking and talking on earth. Well we do have the bible that documents some of Jesus' adventures, but because I am a visual person it would have been awesome to be there. 

    Thinking about this makes me think how far apart we actually are from God Almighty. I mean theology really does sum up to the point that we are not God. He lives in us but is so much higher than us. I think in terms of time and space, where as God created them both! I guess that is what is cool about prayer too, because it reaches outside of time and space to an eternal, immortal and unchanging God. It is even weird to think about God because he is so different from us, the way God came into our context through the incarnation of Christ is so powerful and mind boggling when we think of something coming into time and space. I just really need to remember that God does not work on a schedule but that He is both the beginning and the end. Praise God!

Marty McFly: "Wait a minute, Doc. Ah...are you telling me that you built a time machine...out of a DeLorean?

Dr. Emmet Brown: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car why not do it with some style? 

-Back to the Future 1985

Age and the bible

           When I was 13 the thought of growing up was probably the worst thing I feared that could happen to me. What benefit was there in being old? I always heard people recite their age and then moan helplessly about how time had passed them by with a loud sigh. With age your thinking goes from invincible to cynical or naïveté to pride, seriously what is so great about being older? David was a boy when he defeated Goliath (1 Sam 17:41), most of the disciples were around their twenties when following Jesus and Samuel was a leader since his youth (1 Sam 12:1-3). Now that I am 26 (Still young! At church we learned that in Proverbs 1 the reference to youths were those under 30) I am finally starting to fully respect people older than me for what they experienced in their own lives. Not that I did not respect any of my elders or anything like that, I just never appreciated the age difference. At our regional staff conference last year I remember Chris Nichols recalling a conversation that he had illustrating the complexity of human life, he compared the process of dismantling a toaster and then put the pieces back together versus doing that to a human being. Human life is so complex and filled with stories of loss, regret, hope and courage that at age 13 you can not even comprehend what that all looks like. I take that back, in your typical American life this is true and I am sorry for those that had to experience the complexities of human life in suffering so early. 

      I write this because I think of the passage where the adulterous woman was caught and was about to be stoned in the passage of John 8:1-11 especially verse 9 hit me like a tornado. Jesus knew exactly what to say but I wonder what he thought when his words rang true for the oldest people first. They understood the weight of what Jesus was saying when he says "if any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her" the message paraphrases like this "the sinless one among you, go first: Throw the stone" all I can say is wow such powerful statements from our God. The statement casts a mirror on their WHOLE lives, it would be different if Jesus just said, "if any of you is without sin in the last 20 minutes, let him throw the first stone" Again this shows who God is as savior but I also see this passage as an indication to what older people have gone through. I want to learn from those who are older because they have gone through so much more. 

        I used to get a bit frustrated when someone like James Choung would always mention how he was 10 years older than me, I knew he purposely did that too! But I didn't know why (haha), I did not understand until recently how different I was back then and who God has made me now. I did not realize that James was telling me he had 10 years of learning, preaching, teaching, encouraging, studying...etc. All I heard was something like, "I'm older and thus an authority figure". What hit me recently however was that James threw this statement back at me 2 weeks ago, I don't even know if he remembers. At Ignite in L.A. we had a somber divisional meeting because we found out that both James and Jeff, our supervisors for IV, were leaving next year. Everyone seemed to be in deep conversations afterward in the room and I just stepped out to get some fresh air, when I came back through the double doors I saw James working on his computer. I approached James and thanked him for focusing on Jesus in the rather tense situation and then in a sort of complaint mode said something muffled and blurted out "now there is going to be less older Asian American staff". His reply was "You're it" and mentioned that he was only 29 when he came to San Diego and how leaving also makes more space for people to step up. 

      Granted some people get older and have nothing really change in their lives, I think it is because maybe they stopped learning or maybe they just needed someone 10 years older to knock some sense into them hahah. 

           

Difficult places

    As an InterVarsity campus staff worker I have found that Christians have been the most difficult to work with. The reason is because Christians have been so deeply covered in church language. The language has become so foreign to Christians with words such as atonement, sanctification, glory and admonish that they automatically pour out of a Christians mouth. It is like speaking a code that is just handed down generation to generation. I know this because I am the best example of this "Christianese", I knew every hand motion or Sunday school answer and memory verse. Church culture becomes so natural that many of us forget how non-Christians do not even know what any of these words mean. We have created an inside and outside culture which is very similar to the Pharisee environment that Jesus saw when he was on earth. We are suppose to teach and model Christ and not a church program or else we are like Pharisees. What is lost is even an understanding of why those words were made in the first place. 

   I feel that I have to challenge every student that I meet who has been deeply embedded in the Christian culture so that Jesus can be represented as more than the t-shirts, bumper stickers and God videos. When we look at Scripture we have to push for a more critical thinking than just taking "because Jesus is the light of glory who shines in the darkness for sinners" as an answer for why Jesus had to come, we need to ask why it is important in context and what do those words even mean? There is absolutely no entrance for someone who does not follow Jesus to even understand what that means because it is hard to understand without explanation. I think of it in the way that God came incarnate down to man, something so ridiculously mysterious but revealed so that our limited minds could fathom how deep and important Jesus' life as God on earth, how crazy that really was. We have a job of interpretation, everything that we have experienced or learned about God must be translated so that the world can understand who God is. 

Smiling on what God has given you

     Yesterday I had a great talk with Mr. Joon Han who I am meeting about once a month to get some wisdom. Joon is a father of 3 and founded Better San Diego, he was also on staff with InterVarsity in San Diego back in the day when Asian American staffers were few and spread out. A couple things stick out about Joon, he has extremely long hair like a Japanese Samurai and he does say some pretty audacious things that others would not. I think that is what makes him a good minister of the gospel even though he is not in full time ministry... both the hair and his words. 

      What Joon and I talked about ran pretty deep, all of which can't be written. One of the things that stuck out to me was about not living in the past. This might seem straight forward, but when you are really aware of your past circumstances and experiences every piece of that history really is inside of you. It makes you simply who you are today. We use Bobby Clinton in InterVarsity as a staple of leadership, you lead out of who you are and who you are becoming. Joon also has an uncanny ability to put things into perspective saying things like "if you wake up in the morning about 30,000 other people will have died and you have seen another day" If you have experienced any loss like I have you know that there is significant weight to that statement. We can't live in the past because it does not have any more good for us. We would have wasted years of our lives asking why and holding onto bitterness. 

I guess what I learned from Joon and just observing how he treats his family is that Joon is trying to live for what he has now. To become a better husband and father despite what hardships he had to face before stepping into such a role. This is why I need to really smile on what God has given me. I thought about one story that Joon told me of a guy who was in charge of pastoral counseling at Fuller and how he had a limp hand and open sore on his foot. How this man loved to play golf but could not because of his physical condition. And how Joon asked him if he ever asked God the why question. The man's reply was that he could not live always asking and what good would it do now. 

I know this is cliche but it is true. 

The past is history, the future is a mystery and the present is a gift. 

I'm going to try to play golf this weekend with friends, not to mock the other man but to really enjoy life and what God has given me. 

The difference in morning

    For me personally and probably a good percentage of the collegiate world, I am not a morning person. It has been difficult to read scripture in the morning or to meditate on God without falling asleep (can I hear an Amen!). Theologically, God is no different in the morning than our evenings. I change as the day progresses but God has probably been showing me who He is throughout my whole day. There is a real sense of loss when you miss out on what God is trying to tell you and what your own body pushes for. This radically different and opposing force of the body and its needs must be disciplined. The motivation for discipline should not be centered around fighting off laziness or to be disciplined. But the motivation should be centered around what God is doing in the morning. 

     I am starting to transform in my own thought about the importance of the morning. I hope this continues to improve for me. This might be normal for some of you, but to the "snoozers" and "night owls" in the world this is a good reminder (especially for myself). There is depth in the morning, great conversations that do not occur at night but in the early morning also. It says so in scripture "But his delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night" Psalm 1:2 

We know that the morning was created for amazing purposes just because of who the creator is. "God called the light 'day', and the darkness 'night'. And there was evening, and there was morning--the first day" Genesis 1:5 Each day is a CREATED day, none of us can create a September 17th but it is only God who calls forth each and every day that we NOW experience. The proper response to this realization and to others like it is simply praise for the Almighty, who in His wisdom and goodness created the days for man so that man would in turn praise Him. 

       Now the crazy part is that Jesus is God. So the same attributes apply because this is the same person. Through the incarnation we now see the actual separation of darkness and light in spiritual form. Jesus as God was creating (came down as) light for human hearts. "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" John 1:4-5 Jesus is our new day and this is why we call Him the light of our lives. Not for some "churchy" over used statement, we should understand why Jesus is the light of the world. 

Psalm 118:24

"This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it"

This is the day, This is the day 

This is the day that the Lord hath made, that the Lord hath made

I will rejoice, I will rejoice

and be glad in it, and be glad in it!

This is the day that the Lord hath made, I will rejoice and be glad in it!

This is the day, This is the day 

That the Lord hath made.